Externally Free and Internally Convicted

Externally Free and Internally Convicted

Samuel Bird

In a world that doesn’t know what it wants and is not well suited to the human organism, nearly everything becomes a pathology when it would otherwise be an illustration of quality adaptation. Such was my case as a troubled young man. Medical institutions sought to give names to what ailed me along with subsequent powerful stimululants rather than a questioning of how my environment varied from the needs and arrays of stresses I was designed for. I listened closely as the man with the long white coat used dry terminology to explain away my human experience. “No doubt you have obsessive compulsive disorder. I also wondered if you may have an issue with your attention, but it seems to be much, much higher than normal. Your self awareness really interests me. I am also sure you have a personality disorder, but the manual says I have to wait until you are an adult to diognose you.” He went about listing alleged maladpations with a beauracratic tone that hid its malevolent effects. The complex entity I was that spanned accross time was thrown into conceptual baskets large enough for any person to fall into at least one. The doctor wasn’t interested in hearing about the violence I endured, the desparation I had acted in, and the scarcity I had survived. To him, no problem was anything more than the chemical and a list of pills were named. “While I can’t diognose you formally with it yet, you clearly have oppostional defiant disorder.” While I didn’t like idea that a human sole could be crammed into a word, something about this particular concept at least let me know the doctor was paying good attention. 

From earliest memory when I was supposed to be learning the world in the cool shadow of my parents, they left their post leaving me to see the world in all its blinding brightness and hoping my eyes would adjust. I never had a chance to borrow someone’s faith or knowledge for a series of years while I developed my own. I am incredibly grateful for some powerful ways this makes me think, however it certainly makes trust harder. I have been able to slice out a powerful exclusion for God, but outside of that, I can neither comprehend nor wish to see an authority I can trust. My parents being on either side of partisan politics as the age grew heated with vitriol left me with lots of thoughts and no structure for them to go in. I didn’t want to just get involved in opting into a given group and delegating my thinking. I wanted to have a basis for my belief. This same sentiment became Esse Maxim. I remember walking past the hay-stack on my way to feed the cows while I was considering race, the state, and their relationship. This entity, the state, what was their role in the governance of other’s lives? At the age of thirteen or so and having such little trust in authority that never changed, I was troubled that a few loud voices could control many violent arms to enact how they thought the world world should be. If they could be wrong, then could their be a party that could approximate the human will well enought to direct all human efforts? I though no. It became clear in that moment that the best director of a life is the mind that was percieving it. While this is not central to my beliefs, I may be wrong, and you certainly may disagree, this has lead me to become an anarchist, but I am yet to meet an anarchist I see eye to eye with. While I have little respect for politics, I can sum up my thoughts with the idea that the intricacies of life leave the judgement of the facts most knowable by those that are immeditly aware and able to act on them. This freedom is important to me. By this notion, there should be no entity that stands between you and what you value most. I find the pull between the left and the right to be purely aesthetic, but the pull between authoritarianism and anarchism is existential. I celebrate liberty, but there is no doubt I am not special for this. 

Like any good idea, looking at it without nuance leads to absurdities that counter the initial idea or at least our own efforts. I think of many young people who I knew who grew up around religion. They found that the convictions it placed on them were severe. This limitation seemed to be the same type of constraint listed earlier. To find a sense of control over themselves and the world around them, they left these religious institutions. This was if they were conscienscious as many simply left to stuff their hedonistic gullets. I follow these people to see where it leads them. I find, no where good. Not by my own standard, but theirs. I think of people in my family. With the sexual revolution offering all the pleasure you could hope for at the expense of obligation, they took that chance. The golden shackles of families were tossed aside for the mediocrity of humping a stranger that detested them. In either case, obligation was traded for options. Wasn’t this the freedom I celebrated so? Am I now hating the application of that which I swore to be so sacred? I think there is a distinction here that will make all the difference. To those ideas in others mind you don’t adopt, let rebellion keep you free. To those ideas in your mind worthy of your adoption, let labor keep you bound. Be externally free and internally convicted. Hear, consider, and think about the voices of those around you, but heed not that which you will not. Rather, turn to your God, your Esse Maxim, your values, and sell yourself into bondage to the cause you value most. Your freedom is not a medium for the randomness of your passions but the avenue for the highest desires of your soul to be brought about. I have been open on the importance I see in being a part of the dance of the ages. Late nights rocking a screaming infant is not whatever the flash of your emotions may desire, but it is that which you desire most. Of all things you wish you did in the quiet hours of the night in many decades, this moment will reign over an activities of the Don Juan. In this, I ask you to be selfish, but not shallow. Seek after that which you value with all you have, but choose that value that is most whole, longlasting, and rich. 

The woes of my age are heavy on my mind as they affect me and the people I love, who is everyone. I say in reference to this that we need: “something to do, somewhere to do it, and someone to do it with.” While each has a story, I seek to think on the first. No doubt strangers have walked past to see a skinny young man through the window with hair messed up from running his crooked fingers through it and wondered why he was wasting his time writing and reading on a night so perfect for partying. I am well aware that the adoption of this writing, these ideas, and your cause as I see it, convicts me. By entering into this, I sell away my freedom. With each day merging from the possible to the actual and my character being etched in cracked stone, I choose to embark toward you with the heaviness this carries. Mining my pain and exploring the depths of my horrors could not be labeled any sort of light fun. The more I obligate myself to this cause, the more the mission constricts around my soul. The more I tell those around me about this, the more it is socially pressured that I continue. I sell away all that I am and could be for a few silly words few will read. And why do I do this? Why sell my freedom to a cause as this? For this very reason I am grateful to God I ever had freedom to give. The infinitude of options becomes oppressive aimlessness, but for me, there is now a direction I value. I am aware many other directions have their own merits, but this is the one where I meet your soul and have something to offer it. With wrists extended to my bonds and ankles lifted to chain, I give up my will in each passing moment toward that which I care for very most. Then, when I sit down with these characters who used their freedom to be free and they tease me for my use of my freedom to be convicted, they will have a case. We will have lived all the same years, and yet I will have been more weary. Their evenings in laughter will shine over my nights in tears. However, there is one thing that will be my tender consolation. When you pour your soul into something, there is now a place that holds it. 

In this, I hope Esse Maxim can aid you. Suddenly, brutally, and incredibly, we exist in such a way to have conscious experience. Our senses bombard us with inputs from a world around us and beings that seem to be similar enough to us. The list of epistemic possibilities grows as we lose naive surety. Ideas of what is become unclear and dependent on facts within us. These facts of what is then affect how we act on what we want there to be. There is then a larger epistemic dilemma in seeing how we must act. Don’t let the possibilities stay as merely so. Trade in some of them for some things that certainly will be brought into being via your efforts. As I have said before, I have found your existence to be as valuable as you engage with it. I find it as meaningful as you convict yourself to it. You may worry you will tie yourself down to the wrong thing, but fortunately, it was you that did the tying and no government. When you decide your convictions have a better place, lift the yoke you wore to trade it for another. This yoking yourself to the highest of value is Esse Maxim. This engagement with your existence will not ensure that you get what you want and may even limit your chance to do so. However, it is the engagement that is the metavalue for which all fall post. No life can fail that did it on purpose. I think of the many lives I have seen who’s owners had a case to curse and abandon them. Their deep misery and well earned jadedness was, however, filled by their devotion. I have seen simple people with little to live for in my eyes have everything to live for because of what they valued. One lady in particular comes to mind. Her father died when she was young leaving her with her unstable stepmother. She had children herself, but one passed and the others moved far away and became too busy for her. She lives in a small house and is limited to earn income because of her health. In her desperation, she takes in snakes and lizards who don’t have a home and takes care of them, making dollars too few to care for her, last to care for them. It is such a simple thing that she has committed herself to, but this small sense of being needed allows her to step past all her despair and out of herself because something outside of her needs her. If you want your problems to feel like they magically went away, have a person or idea need you. It never fails to surprise me how I can forget about a heap of problems to care for someone’s pile. More than altruism, this commitment is my adoption of values that bring meaning to a life that was at least prima facia, void. To the world, I do what I want. To myself, I do what it is that I want.